The Real God - The Holiness Of God, Part 1

Let me ask you a question. What comes into your mind when you hear the word holy? I mean, what do you think of when you think God is holy? Is it candles?

Is it incense? Is it unattainable perfection? Well, here's the deal. How can we be holy if we can't even define it? Stay with me. Welcome to this Edition of Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram. Living on the Edge is an international discipleship ministry featuring the Bible teaching of Chip Ingram. I'm Dave Drewy, and we're in Chip's series, The Real God, talking about seven key characteristics that describe who God really is. The first two characteristics we dug into were God's goodness and His sovereignty.

Now, if you missed them, you can catch up any time with the Chip Ingram app. In this program, we shift to a look at God's holiness. Chip only scratches the surface, but what he does share paints a picture of God you may never have thought about. At the end of the program, he'll join us in studio to talk about how to apply what we're learning, so be sure to stay with us for that. Okay, if you have a Bible, open to the book of Hebrews, chapter 12. Here's Chip. And I'd like to take you back to Exodus 19, and imagine if you literally were filming and watching and think, I guess something about me is always drawn to when God does something the first time.

It seems to me that it's very instructive. After 400 years, people don't have a clue of who God is. How does He introduce Himself? What does He want them to know about Him first? Exodus 19 opens up, and it says, after two months, so they've been in the wilderness for 60 days, and God says to Moses, I want to introduce myself to My people that I have redeemed. These will be My people.

And it's that picture, and if you can just imagine, you know, panning with your camera and seeing two million people, maybe you're up high so you have a great view, and two million people in this boundary, and then seeing this smoke billow, and then fire, and then, you know, it's hard to keep a good picture because the ground is shaking, because there's an earthquake, and you watch people fall on their face before God, and this thundering voice. I guess I would ask you if you were doing a documentary, and someone said, this God has just introduced Himself to His people. What's He like? I'm guessing it would not be something like, oh, He's the man upstairs.

He's my homeboy. We have embraced an evangelical Christianity, and our desire to move away from dead ritual, and our desire to know that Jesus is our friend, and God being transcendent is eminent. We have lost much in our tradition, and I would say even in our music, a sense of the holiness of God, the purity of God, the righteousness of God, and when you see that He's holy, here's what you get. You're not.

You're not at all. Your righteousness is like filthy rags, and so is mine. Your motives, your thoughts, your best days, the word holy, set apart, distinct, different, separate.

The word literally means a cut above. He's in a category. The word holy is He is other. There's not a category for Him, and when you come into the presence of a holy God, you are undone, and I don't see many Christians or many churches very often undone in the presence of God. I think some of the older traditions actually helped us grasp God's holiness. Unfortunately, He became a distant cold God who we would reach Him through significant rituals, which was never the intent, but what you find out in church history is a pendulum swings this way, then it swings this way. Here's what I want to tell you.

It needs to swing back this way. We need to know that Jesus is my friend, and that He loves me, and He accepts me just as I am, and He's tenderhearted and quick of sympathy, but the morality of the average Christian in the evangelical church would scream, I don't believe He's holy. I think I can do what I want, when I want, and God basically will give me a pass because in the name of love, which now has sort of upped, no matter what scripture says, oh God is loving, so this kind of relationship must be okay. God is loving, so this kind of morality is okay. God is loving, so I get a pass on everything because a loving God just wants me to be happy.

You know all the statistics. I'm not going to go through all the areas of morality in America today that the average Christian and the average unbeliever look exactly the same. He said we're a kingdom of priests. He said be separate.

He said come out of the darkness. Not weird separate. Doesn't mean you dress funny.

Doesn't mean that you have just habits that make you look weird. It doesn't mean that you're not evolved in the culture, but separate from the inside out that we're actually holy in. I remember praying in thought, word, and deed against Thy divine majesty. It was just memorized as I sat and knelt and stood as an altar boy. Unfortunately, the people who taught me to say that didn't know the Lord personally, and I grew up in a very traditional church that didn't teach the Bible, and our priest on a sort of a good Samaritan trip went to Alaska to preach the social gospel and bring electricity to the Eskimos, but some missionaries got there before he did, and those Eskimos knew the Lord, and those Eskimos led our priest to Christ. Our priest came back, and a movement of God inside our particular denomination that was contrary to a lot of the form was birthed, and people were coming to know the Lord.

I'd gone off to college, had trusted Christ, and I came back, and what I would dream one day is that we might grasp the greatness and the holiness of God in some of the richest traditions, but not lose the intimacy of what it means to have Jesus as our friend. You'll notice on the front of your notes, Tozer would write, we know nothing like the divine holiness. It stands apart, unique, unapproachable, incomprehensible, and unattainable.

I mean, there's a lot of un's in there. The natural man is blind to it. He may fear God's power and admire his wisdom, but his holiness, he cannot even imagine. The first time we see this concept of holiness is right after the Red Sea is parted, and there's a song that Moses sings, and this song we'll learn later is sung currently in heaven, and notice the song is, Who Among the Gods is Like You, O Yahweh? Who is like you?

Answer, no one. Majestic in, what's the first word? Holiness. The word majestic is the idea of exponential multiplying in holiness.

Awesome in glory, working wonders. My best personal definition of holiness is it's both his majesty and moral purity. It's the absolute absence of evil. It encompasses what's pure, holy, righteous. The English root word for holiness has the idea of wholeness or soundness. It encompasses the idea of health, and so to be holy isn't just candles and a black robe and singing special songs with a very low voice, with low lights. It's about the wholeness or the purity of the universe that brings life and brings health, because as God is, he wants us to become, and so not obviously in his essence, but in our character that we would be holy like he's holy. How has God revealed his holiness? In English, when we want to talk about degrees, we say someone is good, and then we say, oh, someone else is better, and then we say someone else is best.

Good, better, best. In Hebrew, the way you talk about things is you repeat it, so in Hebrew, only one time God has called something holy, holy, holy. You see it in Isaiah 6. You see it in Revelation 4. You see it in Revelation 5.

The outstanding character of God is his otherness, his complete purity, his unapproachable light. He's holy, holy, holy. When angelic beings that have never sinned are in his presence, they cover their eyes, they cover their feet, and they fly, and they perpetually say, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was, who is, and who is to come, and so I just want you to get this majestic picture, and then I'm going to just highlight how it shows up in Scripture, and I've given you the passages for your study.

First, through supernatural encounters. Moses meets God. John meets God. Daniel meets God. Isaiah meets God, and here's all I want to say. Whenever you see someone meet God in Scripture, they're undone.

Bam, they're on their face. They're undone, and so the question I have to ask myself and you is when is the last time you were in the presence of God and just, you were undone of the distance between what you know he's like and how you begin to see yourself. Second, he reveals his holiness through places. What you need to know is wherever God is, it instantly becomes holy. It can be a bush, it's holy. It can be just a tent, you call it a tabernacle, and his presence comes, it's holy. It can be a temple that people build, it's holy. Wherever God's presence is, it becomes holy. Third, the way he reveals his holiness is through the law.

The first four commands are all about the distinctiveness, the holiness of God. Have no other gods because there aren't any, and then no graven images. Don't reduce me. Don't make a picture of me.

Don't have an idol. Don't in any way try and reduce me in some form. My name is holy because it's my character.

Don't misuse my name. Don't make vows in my name. The Sabbath, there's this gift I've given to man that supernaturally, when I got done, I stopped to pause, and for 24 hours, I want you to know I'm giving you a gift so that you will be separate, you'll be distinct, you'll be different. You'll accomplish in six days what takes other people seven, and you'll rest and pause so that you'll know the last six days were my hand upon you, and you will pause to remember this is God. Remember the Sabbath to keep it holy. And then the next six commands on the second tablet are about health and holiness in relationships. In other words, the path of holiness, Isaiah would talk about the highway of holiness. There's a path of holiness that you walk on, but the results is health and holiness for you and for relationships. So if you want healthy, whole relationships, honor your mom and dad, don't lie, don't steal, don't commit adultery, and don't covet.

Those are the parameters around holy relationships with one another for the health of God's universe and his people. The prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Zechariah, I just put a few down. I mean, the prophet's job was pretty simple. Stop worshiping idols. Name your prophet. Here's the message. Stop worshiping idols. Because we all do. But God is holy.

He's distinct. And so the prophet's job was simple. To afflict the comfortable and to comfort the afflicted.

They would always intervene and go, whoa, whoa, whoa. You don't understand. God's available. It's your sin. It's what's happened.

It's where you are. He wants to help. That's what the prophets kept saying. And to the people who acted like they didn't need him, they had some pretty harsh stuff. Through wrath and judgment, this may sound odd, but the holiness of God demands that just like a great surgeon would see cancer that needs to be operated on, I'm telling you these doctors, they're heartless.

They really are. My wife had cancer. That guy didn't feel bad. He took a little sharp knife. She's got a huge scar. Pulled out that. Pulled out a bunch of lymph glands.

He didn't feel bad about it at all. Why? Because it was killing her. God, when he sees that which is killing you, killing a nation, destroying what he has made, he brings his righteous wrath and judgment. Acts chapter five. Think about it. The very first sin in the church was what?

Remember? It was hiding money, but the heart of it was hypocrisy. It was their money.

They didn't have to do anything with it. But remember, the goal was Barnabas had given a generous gift from the heart, and a lot of people were going, isn't Barnabas wonderful? And I think Ananias and Sapphira said, we want our cake and eat it too. We want people to think this about us, but we don't want to be that generous.

And so what we're going to do is we're going to make up a story that, you know, we sold it for X amount and we gave it all. And the fact of the matter is, you know, we put the other in a CD over here, relatively speaking. And I mean, now think of this. It's the very first sin recorded in the New Testament. Why did Satan cause you, you know, to lie to the Holy Spirit? Satan has filled your heart. What was the consequences?

It died. Do you think that sent a message through the early church? Or, you know, I'm thinking about becoming a Christian. You want to become in that group?

I don't know. I'll tell you what, authenticity was a pretty high value in the early church. You don't have to have it together, but you better not fake it. But what you see, God declares his holiness. See, we're living in a day where we actually think that the commands of God are like an optional kind of vending machine or salad bar. You know, Ten Commandments, I'm good with one, two, four, seven and nine.

Could I get that to go? But really, it's like we've got a whole generation in evangelical churches with one of those little knives that, well, you know, this one about sexual purity, that's pretty Victorian. On this one about greed, I mean, you know, we're, no, we're not. And so once it happens, we're enough people, we look at one another, and since we're all, quote, are sort of fudging, and people that we respect, well, I really respect so and so, and he or they do this or they do that, and then pretty soon it's like a little cancer and disease. And then the culture of God's people were no longer distinct. And what I can tell you is part of what God will do is he'll bring that velvet vice. I mean, 1 Corinthians 11, you know, this isn't new. Some in the early church, the wealthy would come and they would eat and they would marginalize the poor and they were disgracing the Lord's table. And 1 Corinthians 11 says, for this reason, some of you are sick, judgment, and some of you are asleep.

It's a technical term in the New Testament for a believer who's died. I'll tell you what, if you were in a church where some people died because of their greed and lack of concern for other believers with the Lord's Supper, I'll tell you what, my behavior would change. So where's that God today?

I don't think he's changed. I would suggest that we as Christians often blame the media, education, some political party. When the salt gets unsalty and when the light gets dim, the culture just follows.

The shift in the culture is not going to happen externally. It's going to happen like it always has, inside out. It'll be normal people like us that live holy lives and then we all have little networks of relationships and some of you have really big ones. And you'll just get bold. And by the way, pretty soon it's not going to matter. So you might as well be bold now.

They're going to whack you. You're going to become more and more unpopular. And by the way, what we know historically is probably good. When they got rid of all the missionaries in China and they were persecuted, they went from a few million to a hundred, hundred and twenty million today.

And Greece, Germany, we have some very important relationships there. What's happening among the refugees because of ISIS, I am telling you tens of thousands of people are coming to Christ. Christians who are persecuted, this is historically always true. God will purify his church and he's probably going to do that to some degree and maybe to a big degree in America. So we need to get our chin strap on and realize this is the spiritual NFL and we want to gain yards and people who want to gain yards realize when you come through and if it's a good little hole, bam, you got hit by a linebacker.

Well you don't go, oh, what happened? We've got to quit thinking that somehow that we are living in a culture that is positive toward our faith and our belief and now we're going to have to learn to love people and be kind to people and respond to people because good is more powerful than evil as we lay out our convictions and live out a life that's radically different than probably ever before because the America that you live in now is not the America that was 50, 60 years ago, that was very sympathetic, that shared the values. You're now intolerant, narrow bigots because you believe Jesus is the answer and that there's absolute truth and there's absolute truth about life and about eternity and about morality. Now the danger is championing that in a way where you're hard-headed, legalistic, self-righteous saying that we're better than other people. We've done that before, that didn't work. We need to do it the way Jesus did. We need to live this amazing life before our world that's pure and righteous and take a strong stand and then have people who think that we're the enemies be absolutely astounded.

Why are we driving them to the doctor? Why are we loving people that outwardly hate us? Why do we give good instead of evil? Because that is what turns the life around and that's how holiness brings health. His son obviously, the Lord Jesus, a holy birth, his pure sinless life, we get the sneak preview of his holiness where the transfiguration, his unholy death. You understand that all, I mean this is a great theological truth, 2 Corinthians 5.21 is that when Jesus was hanging on the cross and he said, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Do you understand what was happening? For the first time in all eternity, God the Father turned away from God the Son and there was a break in the fellowship in the singular God but in the person of the Father and the person of the Son because in that moment of time, your sin and my sin and the sin of all people of all time was placed on Christ and he became our sin offering and he became sin on our behalf.

He carried the weight of it all and then the just wrath of God, the just anger of God for all sin of all people was placed on Christ and he atoned, he covered it. I've often longed for an illustration to try and get my arms around holiness because doesn't it feel like it's this, it's here and then it's here and it's here but how do you get your arms around it? The best picture, I was a young pastor in Texas and I lived in the Dallas area and if you know, between Dallas and Oklahoma, it's tornado alley so I mean we had tornadoes all the time and we had, I remember hail would come down, sometimes golf balls, sometimes like a baseball, I mean it was, all my cars had little dents all over them or big dents and we had just a very simple little like 1200 square feet house and three small little bedrooms and no basement which is not good when tornadoes come and so they on the radio, they would tell you, you know, if you have that kind of house but we had a bathroom in the center of the house and I get my wife and I only had three kids, three kids that I put them in the bathroom and then you get a mattress and then when all this starts happening and then you take the mattress and everyone gets in the bathtub and you put the mattress over you and you pray like crazy that one, it doesn't hit your house and two, if it does, that the house goes and you don't and it sounds funny now but it's terrifying then and but something, what would happen is the winds would start but just before they would start, you know, that were, you have these sirens, you know, tornado warning, you know, and then you'd go out and you know, I put my family in the bathroom but I wanted to see what was going on and there'd be like this sky would turn this really funky color of pink and then this sort of weird gray and it would be like this stillness and it'd be like eerie, terrifying but really kind of beautiful and then the winds would come, they'd go and so I remember, you know, you'd see trees, you know, not, I mean the ones that are around like, they were just completely bent over and then often the hail would come down so I would be in the bathroom like this but it was so beautiful, there was something that would draw you because it was so amazing and so powerful and so terrifying and so beautiful at the same time and so, you know, I need to check and see if it's safe yet, you know, and I would go out there and I would just see the trees and hail coming down and it's just like this and that's my best picture of the holiness of God. There's something so beautiful, so powerful, it's like, you know, you know about the hurricane and the very center of the hurricane, there's this absolute stillness and quiet and there's something about the holiness of God that just, it scares you to death, there's such power and yet there's beauty and I think it's, that's what the men and women of old when they got a snapshot of God and it changed them. In fact, it's through the people of God, I'd like you to open your Bibles and I wanna walk through a familiar passage but I want you to see the pattern, I'm sure most of you are familiar with Isaiah chapter six. But Isaiah chapter six is the pattern of what happens to a man or a woman who gets a glimpse of the holiness of God. As I read it, I want you to begin thinking about three views, one, an upward view, two is an inward view and three is an outward view and in the context, I wanna suggest that this is a deep, deep crisis in Israel and if you're a prophet in Israel and the world is falling apart and the political situation is unstable, does this sound familiar?

And you're not sure what the future's going to be like, does this sound familiar? And everyone's fearful and you have a moral responsibility as a spokesman for God to know what's going on, you go meet with God in the midst of a crisis and I'm gonna suggest that your personal crisis or the one that one of your kids have might be the doorway where God leads you to get a glimpse of his holiness. You've been listening to the first part of Chip's message, The Holiness of God, from his series, The Real God.

He'll be back with his application but before he is, let me give you a quick sketch of this series overall. In The Real God, Chip looks at seven key attributes of God's character and explains that none of them is ever diminished or overshadowed by the others, which means that God is 100% love, 100% just and 100% merciful. Kind of mind-bending when you think about it that way and why it becomes a lifelong adventure to get to know him for who he really is. A great way to learn how these attributes of God work together is to do this study with a small group of friends. So for a limited time, the small group resources for The Real God are discounted because we want to do everything we can to help you get a clear, accurate view of God. To place your order or to get more information on The Real God, go to livingontheedge.org, tap special offers on the Chip Ingram app, or give us a call at 888-333-6003.

That's 888-333-6003. Chip, we know that really connecting with other believers, doing life together, is a part of being a follower of Jesus. I mean, Jesus started with a small group, right?

So we know it's important. But what about that someone out there who says, I don't have a group, I don't know where to go, and you know, I have no idea how to begin? What would you say to that person? Well, Dave, what I know is that sometime we're waiting for someone to call us or for the group we used to be in to start, here's what I can say to people. You can start a group. And with our resources, I will tell you, you can invite, you can start with just your family and just say, hey, two or three of us, we're going to order the small group material. We can stream it right on our TV, or you can call three or four friends. And they may be people that are all around the country.

And you just say, I've got to get reconnected from the heart. Here's a small group that we're going to do on marriage or leadership or parenting or the real God. We have over 20 small group resources to meet the very specific needs of what people need to learn or what they're going through right now. And then you get together on Zoom or way better in person. And then you discuss them, but you start the group. I will tell you, people are hurting, and if you have the need, so do your friends. You be the initiator.

Just take the step and say, hey, let's get together. Let's do this series. You will be shocked at how people respond. Don't wait. You need community, so do other people. You be the one to get it started. Dave, can you give them some pointers on exactly what to do? Happy to.

Thanks, Jim. Well, to help you get started, we've temporarily discounted all of our small group resources. There are so many available on relationships, marriage, parenting, doctrine, Christian living.

Doing a small group Bible study that meets a need will help you and everyone in your group take the next step, whatever that means to each of you. Included in each discounted workbook is a unique code to unlock the online videos. Get the workbooks, use your codes, and you're set. To take advantage of this limited-time offer, just go to livingontheedge.org or tap Special Offers on the Chip Ingram app. For more information, give us a call at 888-333-6003.

That's 888-333-6003. Now here's Chip. I don't know about you, but Tozer's words haunt me. He said, we know nothing like the divine holiness. And as we walk through Isaiah's experience, it profoundly, I mean profoundly, convicts me. When I talk to myself, I reduce God, and I take this high and holy and majestic God, and I make Him small. And instead of comparing myself to His holiness, I tend to find other Christians that are a little less holy than me, and I compare myself to them. And yet when I gaze, when I get those brief moments where I gaze into the absolute purity and the sinlessness and the power of a holy God, it crushes me.

How about you? What went through your mind when I described what the human heart is like? What mid-course corrections might you need to make in light of the holiness and the purity of God? Maybe you're like me, and maybe you need to repent of a low, casual view of God that you don't mean to have, but you've just slipped into. Maybe you need to remember that though God is eager to be our friend, that He is immortal, invisible, the only wise God, that He dwells in unapproachable light, and He, and He alone, is holy. Almighty God, would you please forgive us today as you listen to our voice at this moment for reducing you, for making you like us. Lord, we say that you are totally other and pure, and we ask today that you would help us to see you accurately and then live appropriately.

In Jesus' name, amen. Just before we close, I want to say thanks to those of you who are giving regularly to the ministry of Living on the Edge. You're making a huge difference helping other Christians live like Christians. If you're enjoying the benefits of Living on the Edge but aren't yet on the team, would you do that today? You can set up a recurring donation by calling us at 888-333-6003, tapping the donate button on the app, or visiting us online at livingontheedge.org. Thanks for doing whatever the Lord leads you to do. For all of us here, this is Dave Druey saying thanks for listening to this Edition of Living on the Edge.